Configure purchase contracts

Purchase contracts create time and money savings because you set them up with configurations that are repeated for each new incoming expense in the recurrence. These configurations include:

• Choosing a reviewer from your company who authorizes the series of expenses in advance
• A review period that prompts you and the reviewer to reconsider the series of expenses
• Contract prices that define the expected costs over the year (or other period that you choose)

Each of the three methods for starting a purchase contract (outlined in the previous unit) will take you the Purchase Contract card where these settings are configured. To return to this card at another time, navigate to the Purchase Contracts page from the Role Center All cue, or using the search function. Then open the relevant record to view the Purchase Contract card.

Reviewer and approver

The reviewer could be the person who would regularly approve each expense. However, in some cases you may want to choose a different person as reviewer. For example, expenses for a mobile phone service might be regularly approved by a team manager, but a person in finance or IT might be suitable as reviewer, because they have an overview of similar services across your company.

In the General FastTab, choose the relevant person at Purchaser Code (Reviewer).

Review period

Often purchase contracts are reviewed on a yearly basis, but you can choose other review periods in the Review FastTab.

The Next Review Date can be manually configured to align with dates that allow for subscriptions to be renegotiated or canceled.

Contract prices

While many recurring expenses are fixed at exactly the same price each time, you can choose to set an allowed variance to deal with recurring expenses that fluctuate in price from time to time. For example, a phone bill might sometimes include extra charges for overseas data roaming.

For automatically approving expenses that have identical prices each time:

• In the General FastTab, at Price Type, choose Fixed
• At Auto Approve Within Variance, choose Yes

For automatically approving expenses that vary in prices:

• In the General FastTab, at Price Type, choose Variance Allowed
• At Auto Approve Within Variance, choose Yes
• In the Lines FastTab, set a value at Max. Allowed Line Variance %